Criss-Cross / CONTEMPORARY ART EXHIBITION in Zagreb

Roland Berger Strategy Consultants supported an art exhibition at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, one of the leading contemporary art institutions in the region.

Since its founding in 1954, the Museum of Contemporary Art has steadily amassed a rich collection of Croatian and international contemporary visual art. The Museum had been located at the Kulmer Palace in the Upper Town on Katarinin trg 2. Since moving to its new location in 2007, the Museum's permanent art collection has been open to the public.

For the exhibition "Criss-Cross – Five Positions in Croatian and German Contemporary Art" Nada Beroš, Senior Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, selected 11 artists from Croatia and Germany. The exhibition compared and contrasted works by Lovro Artuković, Plamen Dejanoff, Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani, Kristian Kožul, Kristina Leko, Marion Porten, Antje Schiffers, Julia Schmidt, Sonja Vuk and Slaven Tolj, all of whom are internationally renowned artists with distinguished careers. The exhibition positioned the works across from one another, revealing elements of tension and commonality in the artists' works and promoting cultural exchange.

The exhibition's catalog contains introductory texts and essays by Professor Roland Berger (Founder and Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Roland Berger Strategy Consultants), Nada Beroš (Senior Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb), Boris Groys (Professor of Philosophy, Art History and Media Theory at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe), and Julia Schäfer (Gallery of Contemporary Art Leipzig).
The opening ceremony of "Criss-Cross – Five positions in Croatian and German Contemporary Art" took place on November 24, 2005 in Zagreb at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

ABOUT THE CONCEPT

"The exhibition Criss-Cross – Five positions in Croatian and German Contemporary Art presents the works of 11 Croatian and German artists. In their works, similar themes, strategies and behavior models overlap, reflecting the main problems of art as it crosses into the 21st century. Five complementary pairings contrast the notions of East/West, center/periphery, local/global, national/international, artistic/non-artistic, high/low, autonomous/dependent. This contrast confirms that local dialects are but a secondary tool for understanding the international language of contemporary art.

All five mutually overlapping positions – pseudoscientific (Kristina Leko, Antje Schiffers), meta-painting (Lovro Artuković, Julia Schmidt), socio-critical (Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani, Slaven Tolj ), 'social sculpture' (Plamen Dejanoff, Kristian Kožul), and gender construction (Marion Porten, Sonja Vuk) – are in some way related to art. However, each accepts that none of the approaches is the reigning form. Instead, they move along the edges, and satisfy themselves in the small shifts and subversions in existing models of presentation." (Nada Beroš, Senior Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb)